Red, White and Royal Blue

CHAPTER SIX

Henry can’t avoid him forever.
There’s one part of the post-royal wedding arrangement left to fulfill:

Henry’s presence at a state dinner at the end of January. England has a
relatively new prime minister, and Ellen wants to meet him. Henry’s
coming too, staying in the Residence as a courtesy.

Alex smooths out the lapels on his tux and hovers close to June and
Nora as the guests roll in, waiting at the north entrance near the photo line.
He’s aware that he’s rocking anxiously on his heels but can’t seem to stop.
Nora smirks but says nothing. She’s keeping it quiet. He’s still not ready to
tell June. Telling his sister is irreversible, and he can’t do that until he’s
figured out what exactly this is.

Henry enters stage right.
His suit is black, smooth, elegant. Perfect. Alex wants to rip it off.
His face is reserved, then downright ashen when he sees Alex in the
entrance hall. His footsteps stutter, as if he’s thinking of making a run for it.
Alex is not above a flying tackle.
Instead, he keeps walking up the steps, and—
“All right, photos,” Zahra hisses over Alex’s shoulder.
“Oh,” Henry says, like an idiot. Alex hates how much he likes the way
that one stupid vowel curls in his accent. He’s not even into British accents.
He’s into Henry’s British accent.
“Hey,” Alex says under his breath. Fake smile, handshake, cameras
flashing. “Cool to see you’re not dead or anything.”
“Er,” Henry says, adding to the list of vowel sounds he has to show for
himself. It is, unfortunately, also sexy. After all these weeks, the bar is low.
“We need to talk,” Alex says, but Zahra is physically shoving them into
a friendly formation, and there are more photos until Alex is being
shepherded off with the girls to the State Dining Room while Henry is
hauled into photo ops with the prime minister.

The entertainment for the night is a British indie rocker who looks like a
root vegetable and is popular with people in Alex’s demographic for
reasons he can’t even begin to understand. Henry is seated with the prime
minister, and Alex sits and chews his food like it’s personally wronged him
and watches Henry from across the room, seething. Every so often, Henry
will look up, catch Alex’s eye, go pink around the ears, and return to his
rice pilaf as if it’s the most fascinating dish on the planet.

How dare Henry come into Alex’s house looking like the goddamn
James Bond offspring that he is, drink red wine with the prime minister, and
act like he didn’t slip Alex the tongue and ghost him for a month.

“Nora,” he says, leaning over to her while June is off chatting with an
actress from Doctor Who. The night is starting to wind down, and Alex is
over it. “Can you get Henry away from his table?”

She slants a look at him. “Is this a diabolical scheme of seduction?” she
asks. “If so, yes.”

“Sure, yes, that,” he says, and he gets up and heads for the back wall of
the room, where the Secret Service is stationed.

“Amy,” he hisses, grabbing her by the wrist. She makes a quick, aborted
movement, clearly fighting a hardwired takedown reflex. “I need your
help.”

“Where’s the threat?” she says immediately.
“No, no, Jesus.” Alex swallows. “Not like that. I need to get Prince
Henry alone.”
She blinks. “I don’t follow.”
“I need to talk to him in private.”
“I can accompany you outside if you need to speak with him, but I’ll
have to get it approved with his security first.”
“No,” Alex says. He scrubs a hand across his face, glancing back over
his shoulder to confirm Henry’s where he left him, being aggressively
talked at by Nora. “I need him alone.”
The slightest of expressions crosses over Amy’s face. “The best I can do
is the Red Room. You take him any farther and it’s a no-go.”
He looks over his shoulder again at the tall doors across the State
Dining Room. The Red Room is empty on the other side, awaiting the after-
dinner cocktails.
“How long can I have?” he says.

“Five min—”
“I can make that work.”
He turns on his heel and stalks over to the ornamental display of
chocolates, where Nora has apparently lured Henry with the promise of
profiteroles. He plants himself between them.
“Hi,” he says. Nora smiles. Henry’s mouth drops open. “Sorry to
interrupt. Important, um. International. Relations. Stuff.” And he seizes
Henry by the elbow and yanks him bodily away.
“Do you mind?” Henry has the nerve to say.
“Shut your face,” Alex says, briskly leading him away from the tables,
where people are too busy mingling and listening to the music to notice
Alex frog-marching the heir to the throne out of the dining room.
They reach the doors, and Amy is there. She hesitates, hand on the
knob.
“You’re not going to kill him, are you?” she says.
“Probably not,” Alex tells her.
She opens the door just enough to let them through, and Alex hauls
Henry into the Red Room with him.
“What on God’s earth are you doing?” Henry demands.
“Shut up, shut all the way up, oh my God,” Alex hisses, and if he
weren’t already hell-bent on destroying Henry’s infuriating idiot face with
his mouth right now, he would consider doing it with his fist. He’s focused
on the burst of adrenaline carrying his feet over the antique rug, Henry’s tie
wrapped around his fist, the flash in Henry’s eyes. He reaches the nearest
wall, shoves Henry against it, and crushes their mouths together.
Henry’s too shocked to respond, mouth falling open slackly in a way
that’s more surprise than invitation, and for a horrified moment Alex thinks
he calculated all wrong, but then Henry’s kissing him back, and it’s
everything. It feels as good as—better than—he remembered, and he can’t
recall why they haven’t been doing this the whole time, why they’ve been
running belligerent circles around each other for so long without doing
anything about it.
“Wait,” Henry says, breaking off. He pulls back to look at Alex, wild-
eyed, mouth a vivid red, and Alex could fucking scream if he weren’t
worried dignitaries in the next room might hear him. “Should we—”
“What?”

“I mean, er, should we, I dunno, slow down?” Henry says, cringing so
hard at himself that one eye closes. “Go for dinner first, or—”

Alex is actually going to kill him.
“We just had dinner.”
“Right. I meant—I just thought—”
“Stop thinking.”
“Yes. Gladly.”
In one frantic motion, Alex knocks the candelabra off the table next to
them and pushes Henry onto it so he’s sitting with his back against—Alex
looks up and almost breaks into deranged laughter—a portrait of Alexander
Hamilton. Henry’s legs fall open readily and Alex crowds up between them,
wrenching Henry’s head back into another searing kiss.
They’re really moving now, wrecking each other’s suits, Henry’s lip
caught between Alex’s teeth, the portrait’s frame rattling against the wall
when Henry’s head drops back and bangs into it. Alex is at his throat, and
he’s somewhere between angry and giddy, caught up in the space between
years of sworn hate and something else he’s begun to suspect has always
been there. It’s white-hot, and he feels crazy with it, lit up from the inside.
Henry gives as good as he gets, hooking one knee around the back of
Alex’s thigh for leverage, delicate royal sensibilities nowhere in the cut of
his teeth. Alex has been learning for a while Henry isn’t what he thought,
but it’s something else to feel it this close up, the quiet burn in him, the
pent-up person under the perfect veneer who tries and pushes and wants.
He drops a hand onto Henry’s thigh, feeling the electrical pulse there,
the smooth fabric over hard muscle. He pushes up, up, and Henry’s hand
slams down over his, digging his nails in.
“Time’s up!” comes Amy’s voice through a crack in the doors.
They freeze, Alex falling back onto his heels. They can both hear it
now, the sounds of bodies moving too close for comfort, wrapping up the
night. Henry’s hips give one tiny push up into him, involuntary, surprised,
and Alex swears.
“I’m going to die,” Henry says helplessly.
“I’m going to kill you,” Alex tells him.
“Yes, you are,” Henry agrees.
Alex takes an unsteady step backward.

“People are gonna be coming in here soon,” Alex says, reaching down
and trying not to fall on his face as he scoops up the candelabra and shoves
it back onto the table. Henry is standing now, looking wobbly, his shirt
untucked and his hair a mess. Alex reaches up in a panic and starts patting it
back into place. “Fuck, you look—fuck.”

Henry fumbles with his shirt tail, eyes wide, and starts humming “God
Save the Queen” under his breath.

“What are you doing?”
“Christ, I’m trying to make it”—he gestures inelegantly at the front of
his pants—“go away.”
Alex very pointedly does not look down.
“Okay, so,” Alex says. “Yeah. So here’s what we’re gonna do. You are
gonna go be, like, five hundred feet away from me for the rest of the night,
or else I am going to do something that I will deeply regret in front of a lot
of very important people.”
“All right . . .”
“And then,” Alex says, and he grabs Henry’s tie again, close to the knot,
and draws his mouth up to a breath away from Henry’s. He hears Henry
swallow. He wants to follow the sound down his throat. “And then you are
going to come to the East Bedroom on the second floor at eleven o’clock
tonight, and I am going to do very bad things to you, and if you fucking
ghost me again, I’m going to get you put on a fucking no-fly list. Got it?”
Henry bites down on a sound that tries to escape his mouth, and rasps,
“Perfectly.”
Alex is. Well, Alex is probably losing his mind.
It’s 10:48. He’s pacing.
He threw his jacket and tie over the back of the chair as soon as he
returned to his room, and he’s got the first two buttons of his dress shirt
undone. His hands are twisted up in his hair.
This is fine. It’s fine.
It’s definitely a terrible idea. But it’s fine.
He’s not sure if he should take anything else off. He’s unsure of the
dress code for inviting your sworn - enemy - turned - fake - best - friend up to
your room to have sex with you, especially when that room is in the White
House, and especially when that person is a guy, and especially when that
guy is the Prince of England.

The room is dimly lit—a single lamp, in the corner by the couch,
washing the deep blues of the walls neutral. He’s moved all his campaign
files from the bed to the desk and straightened out the bedspread. He looks
at the ancient fireplace, the carved details of the mantel almost as old as the
country itself, and it may not be Kensington Palace, but it looks all right.

God, if any ghosts of Founding Fathers are hanging around the White
House tonight, they must really be suffering.

He’s trying not to think too hard about what comes next. He may not
have experience in practical application, but he’s done research. He has
diagrams. He can do this.

He really, really wants to do this. That much he’s sure about.
He closes his eyes, grounds himself with his fingertips on the cool
surface of his desk, the feathery little edges of papers there. His mind
flashes to Henry, the smooth lines of his suit, the way his breath brushed
Alex’s cheek when he kissed him. His stomach does some embarrassing
acrobatics he plans to never tell anyone about, ever.
Henry, the prince. Henry, the boy in the garden. Henry, the boy in his
bed.
He doesn’t, he reminds himself, even have feelings for the guy. Really.
There’s a knock on the door. Alex checks his phone: 10:54.
He opens the door.
Alex stands there and exhales slowly, eyes on Henry. He’s not sure he’s
ever let himself just look.
Henry is tall and gorgeous, half royalty, half movie star, red wine
lingering on his lips. He’s left his jacket and tie behind, and the sleeves of
his shirt are pushed up to his elbows. He looks nervous around the corners
of his eyes, but he smiles at Alex with one side of his pink mouth and says,
“Sorry I’m early.”
Alex bites his lip. “Find your way here okay?”
“There was a very helpful Secret Service agent,” Henry says. “I think
her name was Amy?”
Alex smiles fully now. “Get in here.”
Henry’s grin takes over his entire face, not his photograph grin, but one
that is crinkly and unguarded and infectious. He hooks his fingertips behind
Alex’s elbow, and Alex follows his lead, bare feet nudging between Henry’s

dress shoes. Henry’s breath ghosts over Alex’s lips, their noses brushing,
and when he finally connects, he’s smiling into it.

Henry shuts and locks the door behind them, sliding one hand up the
nape of Alex’s neck, cradling it. There’s something different about the way
he’s kissing now—it’s measured, deliberate. Soft. Alex isn’t sure why, or
what to do with it.

He settles for pulling Henry in by the sway of his waist, pressing their
bodies flush. He kisses back, but lets himself be kissed however Henry
wants to kiss him, which right now is exactly how he would have expected
Prince Charming to kiss in the first place: sweet and deep and like they’re
standing at sunrise in the fucking moors. He can practically feel the wind in
his hair. It’s ridiculous.

Henry breaks off and says, “How do you want to do this?”
And Alex remembers, suddenly, this is not a sunrise-in-the-moors type
of situation. He grabs Henry by his loosened collar, pushes a little, and says,
“Get on the couch.”
Henry’s breath hitches and he complies. Alex moves to stand over him,
looking down at that soft pink mouth. He feels himself standing at a very
tall, very dangerous precipice, with no intention of backing away. Henry
looks up at him, expectant, hungry.
“You’ve been dodging me for weeks,” Alex says, widening his stance so
his knees bracket Henry’s. He leans down and braces one hand against the
back of the couch, the other grazing over the vulnerable dip of Henry’s
throat. “You went out with a girl.”
“I’m gay,” Henry tells him flatly. One of his broad palms flattens over
Alex’s hip, and Alex inhales sharply, either at the touch or at hearing Henry
finally say it out loud. “Not something wise to pursue as a member of the
royal family. And I wasn’t sure you weren’t going to murder me for kissing
you.”
“Then why’d you do it?” Alex asks him. He leans into Henry’s neck,
dragging his lips over the sensitive skin just behind his ear. He thinks Henry
might be holding his breath.
“Because I—I hoped you wouldn’t. Murder me. I had . . . suspicions
you might want me too,” Henry says. He hisses a little when Alex bites
down lightly on the side of his neck. “Or I thought, until I saw you with

Nora, and then I was . . . jealous . . . and I was drunk and an idiot who got
sick of waiting for the answer to present itself.”

“You were jealous,” Alex says. “You want me.”
Henry moves abruptly, heaving Alex off balance with both hands and
down into his lap, eyes blazing, and he says in a low and deadly voice Alex
has never heard from him before, “Yes, you preening arse, I’ve wanted you
long enough that I won’t have you tease me for another fucking second.”
Turns out being on the receiving end of Henry’s royal authority is an
extreme fucking turn-on. He thinks, as he’s hauled into a bruising kiss, that
he’ll never forgive himself for it. So, like, fuck the moors.
Henry gets a grip on Alex’s hips and pulls him close, so Alex is
properly straddling his lap, and he kisses hard now, more like he had in the
Red Room, with teeth. It shouldn’t work so perfectly—it makes absolutely
no sense—but it does. There’s something about the two of them, the way
they ignite at different temperatures, Alex’s frenetic energy and Henry’s
aching sureness.
He grinds down into Henry’s lap, grunting as he’s met with Henry
already half-hard under him, and Henry’s curse in response is buried in
Alex’s mouth. The kisses turn messy, then, urgent and graceless, and Alex
gets lost in the drag and slide and press of Henry’s lips, the sweet liquor of
it. He pushes his hands into Henry’s hair, and it’s as soft as he always
imagined when he would trace the photo of Henry in June’s magazine, lush
and thick under his fingers. Henry melts at the touch, wraps his arms around
Alex’s waist and holds him there. Alex isn’t going anywhere.
He kisses Henry until it feels like he can’t breathe, until it feels like he’s
going to forget both of their names and titles, until they’re only two people
tangled up in a dark room making a brilliant, epic, unstoppable mistake.
He manages to get the next two buttons on his shirt undone before
Henry grabs it by the tails and pulls it off over his head and makes quick
work of his own. Alex tries not to be in awe of the simple agility of his
hands, tries not to think about classical piano or how swift and smooth
years of polo have trained Henry to be.
“Hang on,” Henry says, and Alex is already groaning in protest, but
Henry pulls back and rests his fingertips on Alex’s lips to shush him. “I
want—” His voice starts and stops, and he’s looking like he’s resolving not

to cringe at himself again. He gathers himself, stroking a finger up to Alex’s
cheek before jutting his chin out defiantly. “I want you on the bed.”

Alex goes fully silent and still, looking into Henry’s eyes and the
question there: Are you going to stop this now that it’s real?

“Well, come on, Your Highness,” Alex says, shifting his weight to give
Henry a last tease before he stands.

“You’re a dick,” Henry says, but he follows, smiling.
Alex climbs onto the bed, sliding back to prop himself up on his elbows
by the pillows, watching as Henry kicks off his shoes and regains his
bearings. He looks transformed in the lamplight, like a god of debauchery,
painted gold with his hair all mussed up and his eyes heavy-lidded. Alex
lets himself stare; the whipcord muscle under his skin, lean and long and
lithe. The spot right at the dip of his waist below his ribs looks impossibly
soft, and Alex might die if he can’t fit his hand into that little curve in the
next five seconds.
In an instant of sudden, vivid clarity, he can’t believe he ever thought he
was straight.
“Quit stalling,” Alex says, pointedly interrupting the moment.
“Bossy,” Henry says, and he complies.
Henry’s body settles over him with a warm, steady weight, one of his
thighs sliding between Alex’s legs and his hands bracing on the pillows, and
Alex feels the points of contact like a static shock at his shoulders, his hips,
the center of his chest.
One of Henry’s hands slides up his stomach and stops, having
encountered the old silver key on the chain resting over his sternum.
“What’s this?”
Alex huffs impatiently. “The key to my mom’s house in Texas,” he says,
winding a hand back into Henry’s hair. “I started wearing it when I moved
here. I guess I thought it would remind me of where I came from or
something—did I or did I not tell you to quit stalling?”
Henry looks up into his eyes, speechless, and Alex tugs him down into
another all-consuming kiss, and Henry bears down on him fully, pressing
him into the bed. Alex’s other hand finds that dip of Henry’s waist, and he
swallows a sound at how devastating it feels under his palm. He’s never
been kissed like this, as if the feeling could swallow him up whole, Henry’s
body grinding down and covering every inch of his. He moves his mouth

from Henry’s to the side of his neck, the spot below his ear, kisses and
kisses it, and bares his teeth. Alex knows it’ll probably leave a mark, which
is against rule number one of clandestine hookups for political offspring—
and probably royals too. He doesn’t care.

He feels Henry find the waistband of his pants, the button, the zipper,
the elastic of his underwear, and then everything goes very hazy, very
quickly.

He opens his eyes to see Henry bringing his hand demurely up to his
elegant royal mouth to spit on it.

“Oh my fucking God,” Alex says, and Henry grins crookedly as he gets
back to work. “Fuck.” His body is moving, his mouth spilling words. “I
can’t believe—God, you are the most insufferable goddamn bastard on the
face of the planet, do you know that—fuck—you’re infuriating, you’re the
worst—you’re—”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Henry says. “Such a mouth on you.” And
when Alex looks again, he finds Henry watching him raptly, eyes bright and
smiling. He keeps eye contact and his rhythm at the same time, and Alex
was wrong before, Henry’s going to be the one to kill him, not the other
way around.

“Wait,” Alex says, clenching his fist in the bedspread, and Henry
immediately stills. “I mean, yes, obviously, oh my God, but like, if you keep
doing that I’m gonna”—Alex’s breath catches—“it’s, that’s just—that’s not
allowed before I get to see you naked.”

Henry tilts his head and smirks. “All right.”
Alex flips them over, kicking off his pants until only his underwear is
left slung low on his hips, and he climbs up the length of Henry’s body,
watching his face grow anxious, eager.
“Hi,” he says, when he reaches Henry’s eye level.
“Hello,” Henry says back.
“I’m gonna take your pants off now,” Alex tells him.
“Yes, good, carry on.”
Alex does, and one of Henry’s hands slides down, leveraging one of
Alex’s thighs up so their bodies meet again right at the hard crux between
them, and they both groan. Alex thinks, dizzily, that it’s been nearly five
years of foreplay, and enough is enough.

He moves his lips down to Henry’s chest, and he feels under his mouth
the beat Henry’s heart skips at the realization of what Alex intends. His own
heartbeat is probably falling out of rhythm too. He’s in so far over his head,
but that’s good—that’s pretty much his comfort zone. He kisses Henry’s
solar plexus, his stomach, the stretch of skin above his waistband.

“I’ve, uh,” Alex begins. “I’ve never actually done this before.”
“Alex,” Henry says, reaching down to stroke at Alex’s hair, “you don’t
have to, I’m—”
“No, I want to,” Alex says, tugging at Henry’s waistband. “I just need
you to tell me if it’s awful.”
Henry is speechless again, looking as if he can’t believe his fucking
luck. “Okay. Of course.”
Alex pictures Henry barefoot in a Kensington Palace kitchen and the
little sliver of vulnerability he got to see so early on, and he thrills at Henry
now, in his bed, spread out and naked and wanting. This can’t be really
happening after everything, but miraculously, it is.
If he’s going by the way Henry’s body responds, by the way Henry’s
hand sweeps up into his hair and clutches onto a fistful of curls, he guesses
he does okay for a first try. He looks up the length of Henry’s body and is
met with burning eye contact, a red lip caught between white teeth. Henry
drops his head back on the pillow and groans something that sounds like
“fucking eyelashes.” He’s maybe a little bit in awe of how Henry arches up
off the mattress, at hearing his sweet, posh voice reciting a litany of
profanities up to the ceiling. Alex is living for it, watching Henry come
undone, letting him be whatever he needs to be while alone with Alex
behind a locked door.
He’s surprised to find himself hauled up to Henry’s mouth and kissed
hungrily. He’s been with girls who didn’t like to be kissed afterward and
girls that didn’t mind it, but Henry revels in it, based on the deep and
comprehensive way he’s kissing him. It occurs to him to make a comment
about narcissism, but instead—
“Not awful?” Alex says between kisses, resting his head on the pillow
next to Henry’s to catch his breath.
“Definitely adequate,” Henry answers, grinning, and he scoops Alex up
against his chest greedily as if he’s trying to touch all of him at once.
Henry’s hands are huge on his back, his jaw sharp and rough with a long

day’s stubble, his shoulders broad enough to eclipse Alex when he rolls
them over and pins Alex to the mattress. None of it feels anything like
anything he’s felt before, but it’s just as good, maybe better.

Henry’s kissing him aggressively once more, confident in a way that’s
rare from Henry. Messy earnestness and rough focus, not a dutiful prince
but any other twenty-something boy enjoying himself doing something he
likes, something he’s good at. And he is good at it. Alex makes a mental
note to figure out which shadowy gay noble taught Henry all this and send
the man a fruit basket.

Henry returns the favor happily, hungrily, and Alex doesn’t know or
care what sounds or words come out of his mouth. He thinks one of them is
“sweetheart” and another is “motherfucker” and some of it might be in
Spanish. Henry is one talented bastard, a man of many hidden gifts, Alex
muses half-hysterically. A true prodigy. God Save the Queen.

When he’s done, he presses a sticky kiss in the crease of Alex’s leg
where he’d slung it over his shoulder, managing to come off polite, and
Alex wants to drag Henry up by the hair, but his body is boneless and
wrecked. He’s blissed out, dead. Ascended to the next plane, merely a pair
of eyes floating through a dopamine haze.

The mattress shifts, and Henry moves up to the pillows, nuzzling his
face into the hollow of Alex’s throat. Alex makes a vague noise of approval,
and his arms fumble around Henry’s waist, but he’s helpless to do much
else. He’s sure he used to know quite a lot of words, in more than one
language, in fact, but he can’t seem to recall any of them.

“Hmm,” Henry hums, the tip of his nose catching on Alex’s. “If I had
known this was all it took to shut you up, I’d have done it ages ago.”

With a feat of Herculean strength, he summons up two whole words:
“Fuck you.”

Distantly, through a slowly clearing fog, through a messy kiss, Alex
can’t help but marvel at the knowledge that he’s crossed some kind of
Rubicon, here in this room that’s almost as old as the country it’s in, like
Washington crossing the Delaware. He laughs into Henry’s mouth, instantly
caught up in his own dramatic mental portrait of the two them painted in
oils, young icons of their nations, naked and shining wet in the lamplight.
He wishes Henry could see it, wonders if he’d find the image as funny.

Henry rolls over onto his back. Alex’s body wants to follow and tuck
into his side, but he stays where he is, watching from a few safe inches
away. He can see a muscle in Henry’s jaw flexing.

“Hey,” he says. He pokes Henry in the arm. “Don’t freak out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” he says, enunciating the words.
Alex wriggles an inch closer in the sheets. “It was fun,” Alex says. “I
had fun. You had fun, right?”
“Definitely,” he says, in a tone that sends a lazy spark up Alex’s spine.
“Okay, cool. So, we can do this again, anytime you want,” Alex says,
dragging the back of his knuckles down Henry’s shoulder. “And you know
this doesn’t like, change anything between us, right? We’re still . . .
whatever we were before, just, you know. With blowjobs.”
Henry covers his eyes with one hand. “Right.”
“So,” Alex says, changing tracks by stretching languidly, “I guess I
should tell you, I’m bisexual.”
“Good to know,” Henry says. His eyes flicker down to Alex’s hip,
where it’s bared above the sheet, and he says as much to Alex as to himself,
“I am very, very gay.”
Alex watches his small smile, the way it wrinkles the corners of his
eyes, and very deliberately does not kiss it.
Part of his brain keeps getting stuck on how strange, and strangely
wonderful, it is to see Henry like this, open and bare in every way. He leans
across the pillow to Alex and presses a soft kiss to his mouth, and Alex
feels fingertips brush over his jaw. The touch is so gentle he has to once
again remind himself not to care too much.
“Hey,” Alex tells him, sliding his mouth closer to Henry’s ear, “you’re
welcome to stay as long as you want, but I should warn you it’s probably in
both of our best interests if you go back to your room before morning.
Unless you want the PPOs to lock the Residence down and come
requisition you from my boudoir.”
“Ah,” Henry says. He pulls away from Alex and rolls back over,
looking up to the ceiling again like a man seeking penance from a wrathful
god. “You’re right.”
“You can stay for another round, if you want to,” Alex offers.
Henry coughs, scrubs a hand through his hair. “I rather think I’d—I’d
better get back to my room.”

Alex watches him fish his boxers from the foot of the bed and start
pulling them back on, sitting up and shaking out his shoulders.

It’s for the best this way, he tells himself; nobody will get any wrong
ideas about what exactly this arrangement is. They’re not going to spoon all
night or wake up in each other’s arms or eat breakfast together. Mutually
satisfying sexual experiences do not a relationship make.

Even if he did want that, there are a million reasons why this will never,
ever be possible.

Alex follows him to the door, watching him turn to hover there
awkwardly.

“Well, er . . .” Henry attempts, looking down at his feet.
Alex rolls his eyes. “For fuck’s sake, man, you just had my dick in your
mouth, you can kiss me good-night.”
Henry looks back up at him, his mouth open and incredulous, and he
throws his head back and laughs, and it’s only him, the nerdy, neurotic,
sweet, insomniac rich guy who constantly sends Alex photos of his dog,
and something slots into place. He leans down and kisses him fiercely, and
then he’s grinning and gone.
“You’re doing what?”
It’s sooner than either of them expected—only two weeks since the state
dinner, two weeks of wanting Henry back under him as soon as possible
and saying everything short of that in their texts. June keeps looking at him
like she’s going to throw his phone in the Potomac.
“An invitation-only charity polo match this weekend,” Henry says over
the phone. “It’s in . . .” He pauses, probably referring back to whatever
itinerary Shaan has given him. “Greenwich, Connecticut? It’s $10,000 a
seat, but I can have you added to the list.”
Alex almost fumbles his coffee all over the south entryway. Amy glares
at him. “Jesus fuck. That is obscene, what are you raising money for,
monocles for babies?” He covers the mouthpiece of the phone with his
hand. “Where’s Zahra? I need to clear my schedule for this weekend.” He
uncovers the phone. “Look, I guess I’ll try to make it, but I’m really busy
right now.”
“I’m sorry, Zahra said you’re bailing on the fundraiser this weekend
because you’re going to a polo match in Connecticut?” June asks from his

bedroom doorway that night, almost startling another cup of coffee out of
his hands.

“Listen,” Alex tells her, “I’m trying to keep up a geopolitical public
relations ruse here.”

“Dude, people are writing fan fiction about y’all—”
“Yeah, Nora sent me that.”
“—I think you can give it a rest.”
“The crown wants me to be there!” he lies quickly. She seems
unconvinced and leaves him with a parting look he’d probably be
concerned about if he cared more about things that aren’t Henry’s mouth
right now.
Which is how he ends up in his J. Crew best on a Saturday at the
Greenwich Polo Club, wondering what the hell he’s gotten himself into.
The woman in front of him is wearing a hat with an entire taxidermied
pigeon on it. High school lacrosse did not prepare him for this kind of
sporting event.
Henry on horseback is nothing new. Henry in full polo gear—the
helmet, the polo sleeves capped right at the bulge of his biceps, the snug
white pants tucked into tall leather boots, the intricately buckled leather
knee padding, the leather gloves—is familiar. He has seen it before.
Categorically, it should be boring. It should not provoke anything visceral,
carnal, or bodice-ripping in nature in him at all.
But Henry urging his horse across the field with the power of his thighs,
his ass bouncing hard in the saddle, the way the muscles in his arms stretch
and flex when he swings, looking the way he does and wearing the things
he’s wearing—it’s a lot.
He’s sweating. It’s February in Connecticut, and Alex is sweating under
his coat.
Worst of all, Henry is good. Alex doesn’t pretend to care about the rules
of the game, but his primary turn-on has always been competence. It’s too
easy to look at Henry’s boots digging into the stirrups for leverage and
conjure up a memory of bare calves underneath, bare feet planted just as
firmly on the mattress. Henry’s thighs open the same way, but with Alex
between them. Sweat dripping down Henry’s brow onto his throat. Just, uh .
. . well, just like that.

He wants—God, after all the months ignoring it, he wants it again, now,
right now.

The match ends after a circle-of-hell amount of time, and Alex feels like
he’ll pass out or scream if he doesn’t get his hands on Henry soon, like the
only thought possible in the universe is Henry’s body and Henry’s flushed
face and every other molecule in existence is just an inconvenience.

“I don’t like that look,” Amy says when they reach the bottom of the
stands, peering into his eyes. “You look . . . sweaty.”

“I’m gonna go, uh,” Alex says. “Say hi to Henry.”
Amy’s mouth settles into a grim line. “Please don’t elaborate.”
“Yeah, I know,” Alex says. “Plausible deniability.”
“I don’t know what you could possibly mean.”
“Sure.” He rakes a hand through his hair. “Yep.”
“Enjoy your summit with the English delegation,” she tells him flatly,
and Alex sends up a vague prayer of thanks for staff NDAs.
He legs it toward the stables, limbs already buzzing with the steady
knowledge of Henry’s body getting incrementally closer to his. Long, lean
legs, grass stains on pristine, tight pants, why does this sport have to be so
completely repulsive while Henry looks so damn good doing it—
“Oh shit—”
He barely stops himself from running headfirst into Henry in the flesh,
who has rounded the corner of the stables.
“Oh, hello.”
They stand there staring at each other, fifteen days removed from Henry
swearing at the ceiling of Alex’s bedroom and unsure how to proceed.
Henry is still in his full polo regalia, gloves and all, and Alex can’t decide if
he is pleased or wants to brain him with a polo stick. Polo bat? Polo club?
Polo . . . mallet? This sport is a travesty.
Henry breaks the silence by adding, “I was coming to find you,
actually.”
“Yeah, hi, here I am.”
“Here you are.”
Alex glances over his shoulder. “There’s, uh. Cameras. Three o’clock.”
“Right,” Henry says, straightening his shoulders. His hair is messy and
slightly damp, color still high in his cheeks from exertion. He’s going to

look like goddamn Apollo in the photos when they go to press. Alex smiles,
knowing they’ll sell.

“Hey, isn’t there, uh, a thing?” Alex says. “You needed to. Uh. Show
me?”

Henry looks at him, glances at the dozens of millionaires and socialites
milling around, and back at him. “Now?”

“It was a four - and - a - half - hour car ride up here, and I have to go back
to DC in an hour, so I don’t know when else you’re expecting to show it to
me.”

Henry takes a beat, his eyes flickering to the cameras again before he
switches on a stage smile and a laugh, cuffing Alex on the shoulder. “Ah,
yes. Right. This way.”

He turns on his boot heel and leads the way around the back of the
stables, veering right into a doorway, and Alex follows. It’s a small,
windowless room attached to the stables, fragrant with leather polish and
stained wood from floor to ceiling, the walls lined with heavy saddles,
riding crops, bridles, and reins.

“What in the rich - white - people - sex - dungeon hell?” Alex wonders
aloud as Henry crosses behind him. He whips a thick leather strap off a
hook on the wall, and Alex almost blacks out.

“What?” Henry says offhandedly, bypassing him to bind the doors shut.
He turns around, sweet-faced and unbelievable. “It’s called a tack room.”

Alex drops his coat and takes three swift steps toward him. “I don’t
actually care,” he says, and grabs Henry by the stupid collar of his stupid
polo and kisses his stupid mouth.

It’s a good kiss, solid and hot, and Alex can’t decide where to put his
hands because he wants to put them everywhere at once.

“Ugh,” he groans in exasperation, shoving Henry backward by the
shoulders and making a disgusted show of looking him up and down. “You
look ridiculous.”

“Should I—” He steps back and puts a foot up on a nearby bench,
moving to undo his kneepads.

“What? No, of course not, keep them on,” Alex says. Henry freezes,
standing there all artistically posed with his thighs apart and one knee up,
the fabric straining. “Oh my God, what are you doing? I can’t even look at
you.” Henry frowns. “No, Jesus, I just meant—I’m so mad at you.” Henry

gingerly puts his boot back on the floor. Alex wants to die. “Just, come
here. Fuck.”

“I’m quite confused.”
“Me fucking too,” Alex says, profoundly suffering for something he
must have done in a previous life. “Listen, I don’t know why, but this whole
thing”—he gestures at Henry’s entire physical presence—“is . . . really
doing it for me, so, I just need to.” Without any further ceremony, he drops
to his knees and starts undoing Henry’s belt, tugging at the fastenings of his
pants.
“Oh, God,” Henry says.
“Yeah,” Alex agrees, and he gets Henry’s boxers down.
“Oh, God,” Henry repeats, this time with feeling.
It’s all still so new to Alex, but it’s not difficult to follow through on
what’s been playing out in elaborate detail in his head for the past hour.
When he looks up, Henry’s face is flushed and transfixed, his lips parted. It
almost hurts to look at him—the athlete’s focus, all the dressings of
aristocracy laid wide open for him. He’s watching Alex, eyes blown dark
and hazy, and Alex is watching him right back, every nerve in both bodies
narrowed down to a single point.
It’s fast and dirty and Henry is swearing up a storm, which is still
disarmingly sexy, but this time it’s punctuated by the occasional word of
praise, and somehow that’s even hotter. Alex isn’t prepared for the way
“that’s good” sounds in Henry’s rounded Buckingham vowels, or for how
luxury leather feels when it strokes approvingly down his cheek, a gloved
thumb brushing the corner of his mouth.
As soon as Henry’s finished, he’s got Alex on the bench and is putting
his kneepads to use.
“I’m still fucking mad at you,” Alex says, destroyed, slumped forward
with his forehead resting on Henry’s shoulder.
“Of course you are,” Henry says vaguely.
Alex completely undermines his point by pulling Henry into a deep and
lingering kiss, and another, and they kiss for an amount of time he decides
not to count or think about.
They sneak out quietly, and Henry touches Alex’s shoulder at the gate
near where his SUV waits, presses his palm into the wool of his coat and
the knot of muscle.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be anywhere near Kensington anytime soon?”
“That shithole?” he says with a wink. “Not if I can help it.”
“Oi,” Henry says. He’s grinning now. “That’s disrespect of the crown,
that is. Insubordination. I’ve thrown men in the dungeons for less.”
Alex turns, walking backward toward the car, hands in the air. “Hey,
don’t threaten me with a good time.”

PARIS?
A <[email protected]> 3/3/20 7:32 PM
TO HENRY

His Royal Highness Prince Henry of
Whatever,

Don’t make me learn your actual title.
Are you going to be at the Paris fundraiser
for rainforest conservation this weekend?
Alex
First Son of Your Former Colony
RE: PARIS?
HENRY <[email protected]>
3/4/20 2:14 AM
TO A
Alex, First Son of Off-Brand England:
First, you should know how terribly
inappropriate it is for you to intentionally
botch my title. I could have you made into a
royal settee cushion for that kind of lèse-
majesté. Fortunately for you, I do not think
you would complement my sitting room decor.
Secondly, no, I will not be attending the
Paris fundraiser; I have a previous
engagement. You shall have to find someone
else to accost in a cloakroom.
Regards,
His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales
RE: PARIS?
A <[email protected]> 3/4/20 2:27 AM

TO HENRY
Huge Raging Headache Prince Henry of Who

Cares,
It is amazing you can sit down to write

emails with that gigantic royal stick up your
ass. I seem to remember you really enjoying
being “accosted.”

Everyone there is going to be boring
anyway. What are you doing?

Alex
First Son of Hating Fundraisers
RE: PARIS?
HENRY <[email protected]>
3/4/20 2:32 AM
TO A
Alex, First Son of Shirking
Responsibilities:
A royal stick is formally known as a
“scepter.”
I’ve been sent to a summit in Germany to
act as if I know anything about wind power.
Primarily, I’ll be getting lectured by old
men in lederhosen and posing for photos with
windmills. The monarchy has decided we care
about sustainable energy, apparently—or at
least that we want to appear to. An utter
romp.
Re: fundraiser guests, I thought you said I
was boring?
Regards,
Harangued Royal Highness
RE: PARIS
A <[email protected]> 3/4/20 2:34 AM
TO: HENRY
Horrible Revolting Heir,

It’s recently come to my attention you’re
not quite as boring as I thought. Sometimes.
Namely when you’re doing the thing with your
tongue.

Alex
First Son of Questionable Late Night Emails
RE: PARIS?
FROM: HENRY <[email protected]>
3/4/20 2:37 AM
TO A
Alex, First Son of Inappropriately Timed
Emails When I’m in Early Morning Meetings:
Are you trying to get fresh with me?
Regards,
Handsome Royal Heretic
RE: PARIS?
A <[email protected]> 3/4/20 2:41 AM
TO HENRY
His Royal Horniness,
If I were trying to get fresh with you, you
would know it.
For example: I’ve been thinking about your
mouth on me all week, and I was hoping I’d
see you in Paris so I could put it to use.
I was also thinking you might know how to
pick French cheeses. Not my area of
expertise.
Alex
First Son of Cheese Shopping and Blowjobs
RE: PARIS?
HENRY <[email protected]>
3/4/20 2:43 AM
TO A
Alex, First Son of Making Me Spill My Tea
in Said Early Morning Meeting:
Hate you. Will try to get out of Germany.

x

CHAPTER SEVEN

Henry does get out of Germany, and he meets Alex near a herd of crêpe-
eating tourists by Place du Tertre, wearing a sharp blue blazer and a wicked
smile. They stumble back to his hotel after two bottles of wine, and Henry
sinks to his knees on the white marble and looks up at Alex with big, blue,
bottomless eyes, and Alex doesn’t know a word in any language to describe
it.

He’s so drunk, and Henry’s mouth is so soft, and it’s all so fucking
French that he forgets to send Henry back to his own hotel. He forgets they
don’t spend the night. So, they do.

He discovers Henry sleeps curled up on his side, his spine poking out in
little sharp points which are actually soft if you reach out and touch them,
very carefully so as not to wake him because he’s actually sleeping for
once. In the morning, room service brings up crusty baguettes and sticky
tarts filled with fat apricots and a copy of Le Monde that Alex makes Henry
translate out loud.

He vaguely remembers telling himself they weren’t going to do things
like this. It’s all a little hazy right now.

When Henry’s gone, Alex finds the stationery by the bed: Fromagerie
Nicole Barthélémy. Leaving your clandestine hookup directions to a
Parisian cheese shop. Alex has to admit: Henry really has a solid handle on
his personal brand.

Later, Zahra texts him a screencap of a BuzzFeed article about his “best
bromance ever” with Henry. It’s a mix of photos: the state dinner, a couple
of shots of them grinning outside the stables in Greenwich, one picked up
from a French girl’s Twitter of Alex leaning back in his chair at a tiny cafe
table while Henry finishes off the bottle of red between them.

Beneath it, Zahra has begrudgingly written: Good work, you
little shit.

He guesses this is how they’re going to do this—the world is going to
keep thinking they’re best friends, and they’re going to keep playing the

part.
He knows, objectively, he should pace himself. It’s only physical. But

Perfect Stoic Prince Charming laughs when he comes, and texts Alex at
weird hours of the night: You’re a mad, spiteful,
unmitigated demon, and I’m going to kiss you until
you forget how to talk. And Alex is kind of obsessed with it.

Alex decides not to think too hard. Normally they’d only cross paths a
few times a year; it takes creative schedule wrangling and a little sweet-
talking of their respective teams to see each other as often as their bodies
demand. At least they’ve got a ruse of international public relations.

Their birthdays, it turns out, are less than three weeks apart, which
means, for most of March, Henry is twenty-three and Alex is twenty-one.
(“I knew he was a goddamn Pisces,” June says). Alex happens to have a
voter registration drive at NYU at the end of March, and when he texts
Henry about it, he gets a brisk response fifteen minutes later: Have
rescheduled visit to New York for nonprofit
business to this weekend. Will be in the city
ready to carry out birthday floggings et al.

The photographers are readily visible when they meet in front of the
Met, so they clasp each other’s hands and Alex says through his big on-
camera smile, “I want you alone, now.”

They’re more careful in the States, and they go up to the hotel room one
at a time—Henry through the back flanked by two tall PPOs, and later, Alex
with Cash, who grins and knows and says nothing.

There’s a lot of champagne and kissing and buttercream from a birthday
cupcake Henry’s inexplicably procured smeared around Alex’s mouth,
Henry’s chest, Alex’s throat, between Henry’s hips. Henry pins his wrists to
the mattress and swallows him down, and Alex is drunk and fucking
transported, feeling every moment of twenty-two years and not a single day
older, some kind of hedonistic youth of history. Birthday head from another
country’s prince will do that.

It’s the last time they see each other for weeks, and after a lot of teasing
and maybe some begging, he convinces Henry to download Snapchat.
Henry mostly sends tame, fully-clothed thirst traps that make Alex sweat in
his lectures: a mirror shot, mud-stained white polo pants, a sharp suit. On a

Saturday, the C-SPAN stream on his phone gets interrupted by Henry on a
sailboat, smiling into the camera with the sun bright on his bare shoulders,
and Alex’s heart goes so fucking weird that he has to put his head in his
hands for a full minute.

(But, like. It’s fine. It’s not a whole thing.)
Between it all, they talk about Alex’s campaign job, Henry’s nonprofit
projects, both of their appearances. They talk about how Pez is now
proclaiming himself fully in love with June and spends half his time with
Henry rhapsodizing about her or begging him to ask Alex if she likes
flowers (yes) or exotic birds (to look at, not to own) or jewelry in the shape
of her own face (no).
There are a lot of days when Henry is happy to hear from him and quick
to respond, a fast, cutting sense of humor, hungry for Alex’s company and
the tangle of thoughts in Alex’s head. But sometimes, he’s taken over by a
dark mood, an unusually acerbic wit, strange and vitrified. He’ll withdraw
for hours or days, and Alex comes to understand this as grief time, little
bouts of depression, or times of “too much.” Henry hates those days
completely. Alex wishes he could help, but he doesn’t particularly mind.
He’s just as attracted to Henry’s cloudy tempers, the way he comes back
from them, and the millions of shades in between.
He’s also learned that Henry’s placid demeanor is shattered with the
right poking. He likes to bring up things he knows will get Henry going,
including:
“Listen,” Henry is saying, heated, over the phone on a Thursday night.
“I don’t give a damn what Joanne has to say, Remus John Lupin is gay as
the day is long, and I won’t hear a word against it.”
“Okay,” Alex says. “For the record, I agree with you, but also, tell me
more.”
He launches into a long-winded tirade, and Alex listens, amused and a
little awed, as Henry works his way to his point: “I just think, as the prince
of this bloody country, that when it comes to Britain’s positive cultural
landmarks, it would be nice if we could not throw our own marginalized
people under the proverbial bus. People sanitize Freddie Mercury or Elton
John or Bowie, who was shagging Jagger up and down Oakley Street in the
seventies, I might add. It’s just not the truth.”

It’s another thing Henry does—whipping out these analyses of what he
reads or watches or listens to that confronts Alex with the fact that he has
both a degree in English literature and a vested interest in the gay history of
his family’s country. Alex has always known his gay American history—
after all, his parents’ politics have been part of it—but it wasn’t until he
figured himself out that he started to engage with it like Henry.

He’s starting to understand what swelled in his chest the first time he
read about Stonewall, why he ached over the SCOTUS decision in 2015.
He starts reading voraciously in his spare time: Walt Whitman, the Laws of
Illinois 1961, The White Night Riot, Paris is Burning. He’s pinned a photo
over his desk at work, a man at a rally in the ’80s in a jacket that says across
the back: IF I DIE OF AIDS—FORGET BURIAL—JUST DROP MY BODY ON

THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.

June’s eyes stick on it one day when she drops by the office to have
lunch with him, giving him the same strange look she gave him over coffee
the morning after Henry snuck into his room. But she doesn’t say anything,
carries on through sushi about her latest project, pulling all her journals
together into a memoir. Alex wonders if any of this stuff would make it into
there. Maybe, if he tells her soon. He should tell her soon.

It’s weird the thing with Henry could make him understand this huge
part of himself, but it does. When he sinks into thoughts of Henry’s hands,
square knuckles and elegant fingers, he wonders how he never realized it
before. When he sees Henry next at a gala in Berlin, and he feels that
gravitational pull, chases it down in the back of a limo, and binds Henry’s
wrists to a hotel bedpost with his own necktie, he knows himself better.

When he shows up for a weekly briefing two days later, Zahra grabs his
jaw with one hand and turns his head, peering closer at the side of his neck.
“Is that a hickey?”

Alex freezes. “I . . . um, no?”
“Do I look stupid to you, Alex?” Zahra says. “Who is giving you
hickeys, and why have you not gotten them to sign an NDA?”
“Oh my God,” he says, because really, the last person Zahra needs to be
concerned about leaking sordid details is Henry. “If I needed an NDA, you
would know. Chill.”
Zahra does not appreciate being told to chill.

“Look at me,” she says. “I have known you since you were still leaving
skid marks in your drawers. You think I don’t know when you’re lying to
me?” She jabs a pointy, polished nail into his chest. “However you got that,
it better be somebody off the approved list of girls you are allowed to be
seen with during the election cycle, which I will email to you again as soon
as you get out of my sight in case you have misplaced it.”

“Jesus, okay.”
“And to remind you,” she goes on, “I will chop my own tit off before I
let you pull some idiotic stunt to cause your mother, our first female
president, to be the first president to lose reelection since H fucking W. Do
you understand me? I will lock you in your room for the next year if I have
to, and you can take your finals by fucking smoke signal. I will staple your
dick to the inside of your leg if that keeps it in your fucking pants.”
She returns to her notes with smooth professionalism, as if she has not
just threatened his life. Behind her, he can see June at her place at the table,
very clearly aware that he’s lying too.
“Do you have a last name?”
Alex has never actually offered a greeting when calling Henry.
“What?” The usual bemused, elongated, one-syllable response.
“A last name,” Alex repeats. It’s late afternoon and stormy outside the
Residence, and he’s on his back in the middle of the Solarium, catching up
on drafts for work. “That thing I have two of. Do you use your dad’s?
Henry Fox? That sounds fucking dope. Or does royalty outrank? Do you
use your mom’s name, then?”
He hears some shuffling over the phone and wonders if Henry’s in bed.
They haven’t been able to see each other in a couple weeks, so his mind is
quick to supply the image.
“The official family name is Mountchristen-Windsor,” Henry says.
“Hyphenate, like yours. So my full name is . . . Henry George Edward
James Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor.”
Alex gapes up at the ceiling. “Oh . . . my God.”
“Truly.”
“I thought Alexander Gabriel Claremont-Diaz was bad.”
“Is that after someone?”
“Alexander after the founding father, Gabriel after the patron saint of
diplomats.”

“That’s a bit on the nose.”
“Yeah, I didn’t have a chance. My sister got Catalina June after the
place and June Carter Cash, but I got all the self-fulfilling prophecies.”
“I did get both of the gay kings,” Henry points out. “There’s a prophecy
for you.”
Alex laughs and kicks his files for the campaign away. He’s not coming
back to them tonight. “Three last names is just mean.”
Henry sighs. “In school, we all went by Wales. Philip is Lieutenant
Windsor in the RAF now, though.”
“Henry Wales, then? That’s not too bad.”
“No, it’s not. Is this the reason you phoned?”
“Maybe,” Alex says. “Call it historical curiosity.” Except the truth is
closer to the slight drag in Henry’s voice and the half step of hesitation
before he speaks that’s been there all week. “Speaking of historical
curiosity, here’s a fun fact: I’m sitting in the room Nancy Reagan was in
when she found out Ronald Reagan got shot.”
“Good Lord.”
“And it’s also where ol’ Tricky Dick told his family he was gonna
resign.”
“I’m sorry—who or what is a Tricky Dick?”
“Nixon! Listen, you’re undoing everything this country’s crusty
forefathers fought for and deflowering the darling of the republic. You at
least need to know basic American history.”
“I hardly think deflowering is the word,” Henry deadpans. “These
arrangements are supposed to be with virgin brides, you know. That
certainly didn’t seem to be the case.”
“Uh-huh, and I’m sure you picked up all those skills from books.”
“Well, I did go to uni. It just wasn’t necessarily the reading that did it.”
Alex hums in suggestive agreement and lets the rhythm of banter fall
out. He looks across the room—the windows that were once only gauzy
curtains on a sleeping room for Taft’s family on hot nights, the corner now
stacked with Leo’s old comic book collectibles where Eisenhower used to
play cards. The stuff underneath the surface. Alex has always sought those
things out.
“Hey,” he says. “You sound weird. You good?”
Henry’s breath catches and he clears his throat. “I’m fine.”

Alex doesn’t say anything, letting the silence stretch in a thin thread
between them before he cuts it. “You know, this whole arrangement we
have . . . you can tell me stuff. I tell you stuff all the time. Politics stuff and
school stuff and nutso family stuff. I know I’m like, not the paragon of
normal human communication, but. You know.”

Another pause.
“I’m not . . . historically great at talking about things,” Henry says.
“Well, I wasn’t historically great at blowjobs, but we all gotta learn and
grow, sweetheart.”
“Wasn’t?”
“Hey,” Alex huffs. “Are you trying to say I’m still not good at them?”
“No, no, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Henry says, and Alex can hear the
small smile in his voice. “It was just the first one that was . . . Well. It was
enthusiastic, at least.”
“I don’t remember you complaining.”
“Yes, well, I’d only been fantasizing about it for ages.”
“See, there’s a thing,” Alex points out. “You just told me that. You can
tell me other stuff.”
“It’s hardly the same.”
He rolls over onto his stomach, considers, and very deliberately says,
“Baby.”
It’s become a thing: baby. He knows it’s become a thing. He’s slipped
up and accidentally said it a few times, and each time, Henry positively
melts and Alex pretends not to notice, but he’s not above playing dirty here.
There’s a slow hiss of an exhale across the line, like air escaping
through a crack in a window.
“It’s, ah. It’s not the best time,” he says. “How did you put it? Nutso
family stuff.”
Alex purses his lips, bites down on his cheek. There it is.
He’s wondered when Henry would finally start talking about the royal
family. He makes oblique references to Philip being wound so tight as to
double as an atomic clock, or to his grandmother’s disapproval, and he
mentions Bea as often as Alex mentions June, but Alex knows there’s more
to it than that. He couldn’t tell you when he started noticing, though, just
like he doesn’t know when he started ticking off the days of Henry’s moods.
“Ah,” he says. “I see.”

“I don’t suppose you keep up with any British tabloids, do you?”
“Not if I can help it.”
Henry offers the bitterest of laughs. “Well, the Daily Mail has always
had a bit of an affinity for airing our dirty laundry. They, er, they gave my
sister this nickname years ago. ‘The Powder Princess.’”
A ding of recognition. “Because of the . . .”
“Yes, the cocaine, Alex.”
“Okay, that does sound familiar.”
Henry sighs. “Well, someone’s managed to bypass security to spray
paint ‘Powder Princess’ on the side of her car.”
“Shit,” Alex says. “And she’s not taking it well?”
“Bea?” Henry laughs, a little more genuinely this time. “No, she doesn’t
usually care about those things. She’s fine. More shaken up that someone
got past security than anything. Gran had an entire PPO team sacked. But . .
. I dunno.”
He trails off, and Alex can guess.
“But you care. Because you want to protect her even though you’re the
little brother.”
“I . . . yes.”
“I know the feeling. Last summer I almost punched a guy at
Lollapalooza because he tried to grab June’s ass.”
“But you didn’t?”
“June had already dumped her milkshake on him,” Alex explains. He
shrugs a little, knowing Henry can’t see it. “And then Amy Tased him. The
smell of burnt strawberry milkshake on a sweaty frat guy is really
something.”
Henry laughs fully at that. “They never do need us, do they?”
“Nope,” Alex agrees. “So you’re upset because the rumors aren’t true.”
“Well . . . they are true, actually,” Henry says.
Oh, Alex thinks.
“Oh,” Alex says. He’s not sure how else to respond, reaching into his
mental store of political platitudes and finding them all clinical and
intolerable.
Henry, with a little trepidation, presses on. “You know, Bea has only
ever wanted to play music,” he starts. “Mum and Dad played too much Joni
Mitchell for her growing up, I think. She wanted guitar lessons; Gran

wanted violin since it was more proper. Bea was allowed to learn both, but
she went to uni for classical violin. Anyway, her last year of uni, Dad died.
It happened so . . . quickly. He just went.”

Alex shuts his eyes. “Fuck.”
“Yeah,” Henry says, voice rough. “We all went round the bend a bit.
Philip just had to be the man of the family, and I was an arsehole, and Mum
didn’t leave her rooms. Bea just stopped seeing the point in anything. I was
starting uni when she finished, and Philip was on a tour in Afghanistan, and
she was out every single night with all the posh London hipsters, sneaking
out to play guitar at secret shows and doing mountains of cocaine. The
papers loved it.”
“Jesus,” Alex hisses. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Henry says, steadiness rising in his voice as if he’s stuck out
his chin in that stubborn way he does sometimes. Alex wishes he could see
it. “In any event, the speculation and paparazzi photos and the goddamn
nickname got to be too much, and Philip came home for a week, and he and
Gran literally put her in a car and had her driven to rehab and called it a
wellness retreat to the press.”
“Wait—sorry,” Alex says before he can stop himself. “Just. Where was
your mom?”
“Mum hasn’t been involved in much since Dad died,” Henry says on an
exhale, then stops short. “Sorry. That’s not fair. It’s . . . the grief has been
total for her. It was paralyzing. It is paralyzing. She was such a spitfire. I
dunno. She still listens, and she tries, and she wants us to be happy. But I
don’t know if she has it in her anymore to be a part of anyone’s happiness.”
“That’s . . . horrible.”
A pause, heavy.
“Anyway, Bea went,” Henry goes on, “against her will, and didn’t think
she had a problem at all, even though you could see her bloody ribs and
she’d barely spoken to me in months, when we grew up inseparable.
Checked herself out after six hours. I remember her calling me that night
from a club, and I lost it. I was, what, eighteen? I drove there and she was
sitting on the back steps, high as a kite, and I sat down next to her and cried
and told her she wasn’t allowed to kill herself because Dad was gone and I
was gay and I didn’t know what the hell to do, and that was how I came out
to her.

“The next day, she went back, and she’s been clean ever since, and
neither of us has ever told anyone about that night. Until now, I suppose.
And I’m not sure why I’ve said all this, I just, I’ve never really said any of
it. I mean, Pez was there for most of it, so, and I—I don’t know.” He clears
his throat. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve ever said this many words out loud
in a row in my entire life, so please feel free to put me out of my misery any
time now.”

“No, no,” Alex says, stumbling over his own tongue in a rush. “I’m glad
you told me. Does it feel better at all to have said it?”

Henry goes silent, and Alex wants so badly to see the shadows of
expressions moving across his face, to be able to touch them with his
fingertips. Alex hears a swallow across the line, and Henry says, “I suppose
so. Thank you. For listening.”

“Yeah, of course,” Alex tells him. “I mean, it’s good to have times when
it’s not all about me, as tedious and exhausting as it may be.”

That earns him a groan, and he bites back a smile when Henry says,
“You are a wanker.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, and he takes the opportunity to ask a question
he’s been wanting to ask for months. “So, um. Does anybody else know?
About you?”

“Bea’s the only one in the family I’ve told, though I’m sure the rest
have suspected. I was always a bit different, never quite had the stiff upper
lip. I think Dad knew and never cared. But Gran sat me down the day I
finished my A levels and made it abundantly clear I was not to let anyone
know about any deviant desires I might be beginning to harbor that may
reflect poorly upon the crown, and there were appropriate channels to
maintain appearances if necessary. So.”

Alex’s stomach turns over. He pictures Henry, a teenager, back-broken
with grief and told to keep it and the rest of him shut up tight.

“What the fuck. Seriously?”
“The wonders of the monarchy,” Henry says loftily.
“God.” Alex scrubs a hand across his face. “I’ve had to fake some shit
for my mom, but nobody’s ever outright told me to lie about who I am.”
“I don’t think she sees it as lying. She sees it as doing what must be
done.”
“Sounds like bullshit.”

Henry sighs. “Hardly any other options, are there?”
There’s a long pause, and Alex is thinking about Henry in his palace,
Henry and the years behind him, how he got here. He bites his lip.
“Hey,” Alex says. “Tell me about your dad.”
Another pause.
“Sorry?”
“I mean, if you don’t—if you want to. I was just thinking I don’t know
much about him except that he was James Bond. What was he like?”
Alex paces the Solarium and listens to Henry talk, stories about a man
with Henry’s same sandy hair and strong, straight nose, someone Alex has
met in shadows that pass through the way Henry speaks and moves and
laughs. He hears about sneaking out of the palace and joyriding around the
countryside, learning to sail, being propped up in director’s chairs. The man
Henry remembers is both superhuman and heartbreakingly flesh and blood,
a man who encompassed Henry’s entire childhood and charmed the world
but was also simply a man.
The way Henry talks about him is a physical feat, drifting up in the
corners with fondness but sagging in the middle under the weight. He tells
Alex in a low voice how his parents met—Princess Catherine, dead set on
being the first princess with a doctorate, mid-twenties and wading through
Shakespeare. How she went to see Henry V at the RSC and Arthur was
starring, how she pushed her way backstage and shook off her security to
disappear into London with him and dance all night. How the Queen forbid
it, but she married him anyway.
He tells Alex about growing up in Kensington, how Bea sang and Philip
clung to his grandmother, but they were happy, buttoned up in cashmere
and knee socks and whisked through foreign countries in helicopters and
shiny cars. A brass telescope from his father for his seventh birthday. How
he realized by the time he was four that every person in the country knew
his name, and how he told his mother he didn’t know if he wanted them to,
and how she knelt down and told him she’d let nothing touch him, not ever.
Alex starts talking too. Henry already hears nearly everything about
Alex’s current life, but talking about how they grew up has always been
some invisible line of demarcation. He talks about Travis County, making
campaign posters with construction paper for fifth grade student council,
family trips to Surfside, running headlong into the waves. He talks about

the big bay window in the house where he grew up, and Henry doesn’t tell
him he’s crazy for all the things he used to write and hide under there.

It starts to grow dark outside, a dull and soggy evening around the
Residence, and Alex makes his way down to his room and his bed. He hears
about the assortment of guys from Henry’s university days, all of them
enamored with the idea of sleeping with a prince, almost all of them
immediately alienated by the paperwork and secrecy and, occasionally,
Henry’s dark moods about the paperwork and secrecy.

“But of course, er,” Henry says, “nobody since . . . well, since you and I
—”

“No,” Alex says, faster than he expects, “me neither. Nobody else.”
He hears words coming out of his mouth, ones he can’t believe he’s
saying out loud. About Liam, about those nights, but also how he’d sneak
pills out of Liam’s Adderall bottle when his grades were slipping and stay
awake for two, three days at a time. About June, the unspoken knowledge
that she only lives here to watch out for him, the quiet sense of guilt he
carries when he can’t tear himself away. About how much some of the lies
people tell about his mother hurt, the fear she’ll lose.
They talk for so long Alex has to plug his phone in to keep the battery
from dying. He rolls onto his side and listens, trails the back of his hand
across the pillow next to him and imagines Henry lying opposite in his own
bed, two parentheses enclosing 3,700 miles. He looks at his chewed-up
cuticles and imagines Henry there under his fingers, speaking into only
inches of distance. He imagines the way Henry’s face would look in the
bluish-gray dark. Maybe he would have a faint shadow of stubble on his
jaw, waiting for a morning shave, or maybe the circles under his eyes would
wash out in the low light.
Somehow, this is the same person who had Alex so convinced he didn’t
care about anything, who still has the rest of the world convinced he’s a
mild, unfettered Prince Charming. It’s taken months to get here: the full
realization of just how wrong he was.
“I miss you,” Alex says before he can stop himself.
He instantly regrets it, but Henry says, “I miss you too.”

***

“Hey, wait.”
Alex rolls his chair back out of his cubicle. The woman from the after-

hours cleaning crew stops, her hand on the handle of the coffee pot. “I know
it looks disgusting, but would you mind leaving that? I was gonna finish it.”

She gives him a dubious look but leaves the last burnt, sludgy vestiges
of coffee where they are and rolls off with her cart.

He peers down into his CLAREMONT FOR AMERICA mug and frowns at

the almond milk that’s pooled in the middle. Why doesn’t this office keep
normal milk around? This is why people from Texas hate Washington elites.
Ruining the goddamn dairy industry.

On his desk, there are three stacks of papers. He keeps staring at them,
hoping if he recites them enough times in his head, he’ll figure out how to
feel like he’s doing enough.

One. The Gun File. A detailed index of every kind of insane gun
Americans can own and state-by-state regulations, which he has to comb
through for research on a new set of federal assault rifle policies. It’s got a
giant smudge of pizza sauce on it because it makes him stress-eat.

Two. The Trans-Pacific Partnership File, which he knows he needs to
work on but has barely touched because it’s mind-numbingly boring.

Three. The Texas File.
He’s not supposed to have this file. It wasn’t given to him by the policy
chief of staff or anyone on the campaign. It’s not even about policy. It’s also
more of a binder than a file. He guesses he should call it: The Texas Binder.
The Texas Binder is his baby. He guards it jealously, stuffing it into his
messenger bag to take home with him when he leaves the office and hiding
it from WASPy Hunter. It contains a county map of Texas with complex
voter demographic breakdowns, matched up with the populations of
children of undocumented immigrants, unregistered voters who are legal
residents, voting patterns over the last twenty years. He’s stuffed it with
spreadsheets of data, voting records, projections he had Nora calculate for
him.
Back in 2016, when his mother squeezed out a victory in the general
election, the bitterest sting was losing Texas. She was the first president
since Nixon to win the presidency but lose her own state of residence. It
wasn’t exactly a surprise, considering Texas had been polling red, but they

were all secretly holding out for the Lometa Longshot to take it in the end.
She didn’t.

Alex keeps coming back to the numbers from 2016 and 2018 precinct
by precinct, and he can’t shake this nagging feeling of hope. There’s
something there, something shifting, he swears it.

He doesn’t mean to be ungrateful for the policy job, it’s just . . . not
what he thought it was going to be. It’s frustrating and slow-moving. He
should stay focused, give it more time, but instead, he keeps coming back to
the binder.

He plucks a pencil out of WASPy Hunter’s Harvard pencil cup and
starts sketching lines on the map of Texas for the millionth time,
redistricting the districts old white men drew years ago to force votes their
way.

Alex has this spark at the base of his spine to do the most good he can,
and when he sits here in his cubicle for hours a day and fidgets under all the
minutiae, he doesn’t know if he is. But if he could only figure out a way to
make Texas’ vote reflect its soul . . . he’s nowhere near qualified to
singlehandedly dismantle Texas’ iron curtains of gerrymandering, but what
if he—

An incessant buzzing snaps him present, and he digs out his phone from
the bottom of his bag.

“Where are you?” June’s voice demands over the line.
Fuck. He checks the time: 9:44. He was supposed to meet June for
dinner over an hour ago.
“Shit, June, I’m so sorry,” he says, jumping up from his desk and
shoving his things into his bag. “I got caught up at work—I, I completely
forgot.”
“I sent you like a million texts,” she says. She sounds like she’s vision-
boarding his funeral.
“My phone was on silent,” he says helplessly, booking it for the
elevator. “I’m seriously so sorry. I’m a complete jackass. I’m leaving now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I got mine to go. I’ll see you at
home.”
“Bug.”
“I’m gonna need you to not call me that right now.”
“June—”

The call drops.
When he gets back to the Residence, she’s sitting on her bed, eating
pasta out of a plastic container, with Parks & Recreation playing on her
tablet. She pointedly ignores him when he comes to her doorway.
He’s reminded of when they were kids—around eight and eleven years
old. He recalls standing next to her at the bathroom mirror, looking at the
similarities between their faces: the same round tips of their noses, the same
thick, unruly brows, the same square jaw inherited from their mother. He
remembers studying her expression in the reflection as they brushed their
teeth, the morning of the first day of school, their dad having braided June’s
hair for her because their mom was in DC and couldn’t be there.
He recognizes the same expression on her face now: carefully tucked-
away disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” he tries again. “I honestly feel like complete and total shit.
Please don’t be mad at me.”
June keeps chewing, looking steadfastly at Leslie Knope chirping away
in the background.
“We can do lunch tomorrow,” Alex says desperately. “I’ll pay.”
“I don’t care about a stupid meal, Alex.”
Alex sighs. “Then what do you want me to do?”
“I want you not to be Mom,” June says, finally looking up at him. She
closes her food container and gets up off her bed, pacing across the room.
“Okay,” Alex says, raising both hands, “is that what’s happening right
now?”
“I—” She takes a deep breath. “No. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No, you obviously meant it,” Alex says. He drops his messenger bag
and steps into the room. “Why don’t you say whatever it is you need to
say?”
She turns to face him, arms folded, her spine braced against her dresser.
“You really don’t see it? You never sleep, you’re always throwing yourself
into something, you’re willing to let Mom use you for whatever she wants,
the tabloids are always after you—”
“June, I’ve always been this way,” he interrupts gently. “I’m gonna be a
politician. You always knew that. I’m starting as soon as I graduate . . . in a
month. This is how my life is gonna be, okay? I’m choosing it.”
“Well, maybe it’s the wrong choice,” June says, biting her lip.

He rocks back on his heels. “Where the hell is this coming from?”
“Alex,” she says, “come on.”
He doesn’t know what the hell she’s getting at. “You’ve always backed
me up until now.”
She flings one arm out emphatically enough to upset an entire potted
cactus on her dresser and says, “Because until now you weren’t fucking the
Prince of England!”
That effectively snaps Alex’s mouth shut. He crosses to the sitting area
in front of the fireplace, sinking down into an armchair. June watches him,
cheeks bright scarlet.
“Nora told you.”
“What?” she says. “No. She wouldn’t do that. Although it kinda sucks
you told her and not me.” She folds her arms again. “I’m sorry, I was trying
to wait for you to tell me yourself, but, Jesus, Alex. How many times was I
supposed to believe you were volunteering to take those international
appearances we always found excuses to get out of? And, like, did you
forget I’ve lived across the hall from you for almost my entire life?”
Alex looks down at his shoes, June’s perfectly curated midcentury rug.
“So you’re mad at me because of Henry?”
June makes a strangled noise, and when he looks back up, she’s digging
through the top drawer of her dresser. “Oh my God, how are you so smart
and so dumb at the same time?” she says, pulling a magazine out from
underneath her underwear. He’s about to tell her he’s not in the mood to
look at her tabloids when she throws it at him.
An ancient issue of J14, opened to a center page. The photograph of
Henry, age thirteen.
He glances up. “You knew?”
“Of course I knew!” she says, flopping dramatically into the chair
opposite him. “You were always leaving your greasy little fingerprints all
over it! Why do you always assume you can get away with things?” She
releases a long-suffering sigh. “I never really . . . got what he was to you,
until I got it. I thought you had a crush or something, or that I could help
you make a friend, but, Alex. We meet so many people. I mean, thousands
and thousands of people, and a lot of them are morons, and a lot of them are
incredible, unique people, but I almost never meet somebody who’s a match
for you. Do you know that?” She leans forward and touches his knee, pink

fingernails on his navy chinos. “You have so much in you, it’s almost
impossible to match it. But he’s your match, dumbass.”

Alex stares at her, trying to process what she’s said.
“I feel like this is your starry-eyed romantic thing projecting onto me,”
is what he decides to say, and she immediately withdraws her hand from his
leg and returns to glaring at him.
“You know Evan didn’t break up with me?” she says. “I broke up with
him. I was gonna go to California with him, live in the same time zone as
Dad, get a job at the fucking Sacramento Bee or something. But I gave all
that up to come here, because it was the right thing to do. I did what Dad
did—I went where I was most needed, because it was my responsibility.”
“And you regret it?”
“No,” she says. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I—I wonder. Dad
wonders, sometimes. Alex, you don’t have to wonder. You don’t have to be
our parents. You can keep Henry, and figure the rest out.” Now she’s
looking at him evenly, steadily. “Sometimes you have a fire under your ass
for no good goddamn reason. You’re gonna burn out like this.”
Alex leans back, thumbing the stitching on the armrest of the chair.
“So, what?” he asks. “You want me to quit politics and go become a
princess? That’s not very feminist of you.”
“That’s not how feminism works,” she says, rolling her eyes. “And
that’s not what I mean. I mean . . . I don’t know. Have you ever considered
there might be more than one path to use what you have? Or to get where
you want to be to make the most difference in the world?”
“I’m not sure I’m following.”
“Well.” She looks down at her cuticles. “It’s like the whole Sac Bee
thing—it never actually would have worked out. It was a dream I had
before Mom was president. The kind of journalism I wanted to do is the
kind of journalism that being a First Daughter pretty much disqualifies you
from. But the world is better with her where she is, and right now I’m
looking for a new dream that’s better too.” Her big brown Diaz eyes blink
up at him. “So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s more than one dream for you,
or more than one way to get there.”
She gives a crooked shrug, tilting her head to look at him openly. June
is often a mystery, a big ball of complex emotions and motivations, but her
heart is honest and true. She’s very much what Alex holds in his memory as

the sanctified idea of Southerness at its best: always generous and warm
and sincere, work-strong and reliable, a light left on. She wants the best for
him, plainly, in an unselfish and uncalculating way. She’s been trying to talk
to him for a while, he realizes.

He looks down at the magazine, he feels the corner of his mouth tug
upward. He can’t believe June kept it all these years.

“He looks so different,” he says after a long minute, gazing down at the
baby Henry on the page and his easy, unfledged sureness. “I mean, like,
obviously. But the way he carries himself.” His fingertips brush the page in
the same place they did when he was young, over the sun-gold hair, except
now he knows its exact texture. It’s the first time he’s seen it since he
learned where this version of Henry went. “It pisses me off sometimes,
thinking about everything he’s been through. He’s a good person. He really
cares, and he tries. He never deserved any of it.”

June leans forward, looking at the picture too. “Have you ever told him
that?”

“We don’t really . . .” Alex coughs. “I don’t know. Talk like that?”
June inhales deeply and makes an enormous fart noise with her mouth,
shattering the serious mood, and Alex is so grateful for it that he melts onto
the floor in a fit of hysterical laughter.
“Ugh! Men!” she groans. “No emotional vocabulary. I can’t believe our
ancestors survived centuries of wars and plagues and genocide just to wind
up with your sorry ass.” She throws a pillow at him, and Alex scream-
laughs as it hits him in the face. “You should try saying some of that stuff to
him.”
“Stop trying to Jane Austen my life!” he yells back.
“Listen, it’s not my fault he’s a mysterious and retiring young royal and
you’re the tempestuous ingénue that caught his eye, okay?”
He laughs and tries to crawl away, even as she claws at his ankle and
wallops another pillow at his head. He still feels guilty for blowing her off,
but he thinks they’re okay now. He’ll do better. They fight for a spot on her
big canopy bed, and she makes him spill what it’s like to be secretly
hooking up with a real-life prince. And so June knows; she knows about
him and she hugs him and doesn’t care. He didn’t realize how terrified he
was of her knowing until the fear is gone.

She puts Parks back on and has the kitchen send up ice cream, and Alex
thinks about how she said, “You don’t have to be our parents”—she’s never
mentioned their dad in the same context as their mom like that before. He’s
always known she resents their mom for the position they occupy in the
world, for not having a normal life, for taking herself away from them. But
he never really realized she felt the same sense of loss he does deep down
about their dad, that it’s something she dealt with and moved past. That the
stuff with their mom is something she’s still going through.

He thinks she’s wrong about him, mostly—he doesn’t necessarily
believe he has to choose between politics and this thing with Henry yet, or
that he’s moving too fast in his career. But . . . there’s the Texas Binder, and
the knowledge of other states like Texas and millions of other people who
need someone to fight for them, and the feeling at the base of his spine, like
there’s a lot of fight in him that could be honed down to a more productive
point.

There’s law school.
Every time he looks at the Texas Binder, he knows it’s a big fat case for
him to go take the damn LSAT like he knows both his parents wish he
would instead of diving headfirst into politics. He’s always, always said no.
He doesn’t wait for things. Doesn’t put in the time like that, do what he’s
told.
He’s never given much thought to options other than a crow’s path
ahead of him. Maybe he should.
“Is now a good time to point out Henry’s very hot, very rich best friend
is basically in love with you?” Alex says to June. “He’s like some kind of
billionaire, genius, manic-pixie-dream philanthropist. I feel like you would
be into that.”
“Please shut up,” she says, and she steals the ice cream back.
Once June knows, their circle of “knowing” is up to a tight seven.
Before Henry, most of his romantic entanglements as FSOTUS were
one-off incidents that involved Cash or Amy confiscating phones before the
act and pointing at the dotted line on the NDA on the way out—Amy with
mechanical professionalism, Cash with the air of a cruise ship director. It
was inevitable they be looped in.
And there’s Shaan, the only member of the royal staff who knows
Henry is gay, excluding his therapist. Shaan ultimately doesn’t care about

Henry’s sexual preferences as long as they’re not getting him into trouble.
He’s a consummate professional parceled in immaculately tailored Tom
Ford, ruffled by absolutely nothing, whose affection for his charge shows in
the way he tends to him like a favorite houseplant. Shaan knows for the
same reason Amy and Cash know: absolute necessity.

Then Nora, who still looks smug every time the subject arises. And Bea,
who found out when she walked in on one of their after-dark FaceTime
sessions, leaving Henry capable of nothing but flustered British stammering
and thousand-yard stares for the next day and a half.

Pez seems to have been in on the secret all along. Alex imagines he
demanded an explanation when Henry literally made them flee the country
under the cover of night after putting his tongue in Alex’s mouth in the
Kennedy Garden.

It’s Pez who answers when Alex FaceTimes Henry at four a.m. DC
time, expecting to catch Henry over his morning tea. Henry is holidaying in
one of the family’s country homes while Alex suffocates under his last
week of college. He doesn’t reflect on why his migraine demands soothing
images of Henry looking cozy and picturesque, sipping tea by a lush green
hillside. He just hits the buttons on the phone.

“Alexander, babes,” Pez says when he picks up. “How lovely for you to
give your auntie Pezza a ring on this magnificent Sunday morning.” He’s
smiling from what looks like the passenger seat of a luxury car, wearing a
cartoonishly large sunhat and a striped pashmina.

“Hi, Pez,” Alex says, grinning back. “Where are y’all?”
“We are out for a drive, taking in the scenery of Carmarthenshire,” Pez
tells him. He tilts the phone over toward the driver’s seat. “Say good
morning to your strumpet, Henry.”
“Good morning, strumpet,” Henry says, glancing away from the road to
wink at the camera. He’s looking fresh-faced and relaxed, all rolled up
sleeves and soft gray linen, and Alex feels calmer knowing somewhere in
Wales, Henry got a decent night’s sleep. “What’s got you up at four in the
morning this time?”
“My fucking economics final,” Alex says, rolling over onto his side to
squint at the screen. “My brain isn’t working anymore.”
“Can’t you get one of those Secret Service earpieces with Nora on the
other end?”

“I can take it for you,” Pez interjects, turning the camera back to
himself. “I’m aces with money.”

“Yes, yes, Pez, we know there’s nothing you can’t do,” says Henry’s
voice off-camera. “No need to rub it in.”

Alex laughs under his breath. From the angle Pez is holding the phone,
he can see Wales rolling by though the car window, dramatic and plunging.
“Hey, Henry, say the name of the house you’re staying at again.”

Pez turns the camera to catch Henry in a half smile. “Llwynywermod.”
“One more time.”
“Llwynywermod.”
Alex groans. “Jesus.”
“I was hoping you two would start talking dirty,” Pez says. “Please, do
go on.”
“I don’t think you could keep up, Pez,” Alex tells him.
“Oh really?” The picture returns to Pez. “What if I put my co—”
“Pez,” comes the sound of Henry’s voice, and a hand with a signet ring
on the smallest finger covers Pez’s mouth. “I beg of you. Alex, what part of
‘nothing he cannot do’ did you think was worth testing? Honestly, you are
going to get us all killed.”
“That’s the goal,” Alex says happily. “So what are y’all gonna do
today?”
Pez frees himself by licking Henry’s palm and continues talking. “Frolic
naked in the hills, frighten the sheep, return to the house for the usual: tea,
biscuits, casting ourselves upon the Thighmaster of love to moan about
Claremont-Diaz siblings, which has become tragically one-sided since
Henry took up with you. It used to be all bottles of cognac and shared
malaise and ‘when will they notice us’—”
“Don’t tell him that!”
“—and now I just ask Henry, ‘What is your secret?’ And he says, ‘I
insult Alex all the time and that seems to work.’”
“I will turn this car around.”
“That won’t work on June,” Alex says.
“Let me get a pen—”
It turns out they’re spending their holiday workshopping philanthropy
projects. Henry’s been telling Alex for months about their plans to go
international, and now they’re talking three refugee programs around

Western Europe, HIV clinics in Nairobi and Los Angeles, LGBT youth
shelters in four different countries. It’s ambitious, but since Henry still
staunchly covers all his own expenses with his inheritance from his father,
his royal accounts are untouched. He’s determined to use them for nothing
but this.

Alex curls around his phone and his pillow as the sun comes up over
DC. He’s always wanted to be a person with a legacy in this world. Henry is
undoubtedly, determinedly that. It’s a little intoxicating. But it’s fine. He’s
just a little sleep-deprived.

All in all, finals come and go with much less fanfare than Alex
imagined. It’s a week of cramming and presentations and the usual amount
of all-nighters, and it’s over.

The whole college thing in general went by like that. He didn’t really
have the experiences everyone else has, always isolated by fame or
harangued by security. He never got a stamp on his forehead on his twenty-
first birthday at The Tombs, never jumped in Dalhgren Fountain.
Sometimes it’s like he barely went to Georgetown, merely powered through
a series of lectures that happened to be in the same geographical area.

Anyway, he graduates, and the whole auditorium gives him a standing
ovation, which is weird but kind of cool. A dozen of his classmates want to
take a photo with him afterward. They all know him by name. He’s never
spoken to any of them before. He smiles for their parents’ iPhones and
wonders if he should have tried.

Alex Claremont-Diaz graduates summa cum laude from Georgetown
University with a bachelor’s degree in Government, his Google alerts read
when he checks them from the back seat of the limo, before he’s even taken
his cap and gown off.

There’s a huge garden party at the White House, and Nora is there in a
dress and blazer and a sly smile, pressing a kiss to the side of Alex’s jaw.

“The last of the White House Trio finally graduates,” she says, grinning.
“And he didn’t even have to bribe any professors with political or sexual
favors to do it.”

“I think some of them might finally manage to purge me from their
nightmares soon,” Alex says.

“Y’all do school weird,” June says, crying a little.

There’s a mixed bag of political power players and family friends in
attendance—including Rafael Luna, who falls under the heading of both.
Alex spots him looking tired but handsome by the ceviche, involved in
animated conversation with Nora’s grandfather, the Veep. His dad is in from
California, freshly tanned from a recent trek through Yosemite, grinning
and proud. Zahra hands him a card that says, Good job doing what was
expected of you, and nearly shoves him into the punch bowl when he tries to
hug her.

An hour in, his phone buzzes in his pocket, and June gives him a mild
glare when he diverts his attention mid-sentence to check it. He’s ready to
brush it off, but all around him iPhones and Blackberries are coming out in
a flurry of movement.

It’s WASPy Hunter: Jacinto just called a presser,
word is he’s dropping out of the primary a.k.a.
officially Claremont vs. Richards 2020.

“Shit,” Alex says, turning his phone around to show June the message.
“So much for the party.”
She’s right—in a matter of seconds, half the tables are empty as
campaign staffers and congresspeople leave their seats to huddle together
over their phones.
“This is a bit dramatic,” Nora observes, sucking an olive off the end of a
toothpick. “We all knew he was gonna give Richards the nomination
eventually. They probably got Jacinto in a windowless room and bench-
clamped his dick to the table until he said he’d concede.”
Alex doesn’t hear whatever Nora says next because a rush of movement
at the doors of the Palm Room near the edge of the garden catches his eye.
It’s his dad, pulling Luna by the arm. They disappear into a side door,
toward the housekeeper’s office.
He leaves his champagne with the girls and weaves a circuitous path
toward the Palm Room, pretending to check his phone. Then, after
considering whether the scolding he’ll get from the dry-cleaning crew will
be worth it, he ducks into the shrubbery.
There’s a loose windowpane in the bottom of the third fixture of the
south-facing wall of the housekeeper’s office. It’s popped out of its frame
slightly, enough that its bulletproof, soundproof seal isn’t totally intact. It’s

one of three windowpanes like this in the Residence. He found them during
his first six months at the White House, before June graduated and Nora
transferred, when he was alone, with nothing better to do than these little
investigative projects around the grounds.

He’s never told anyone about the loose panes; he always suspected they
might come in handy one day.

He crouches down and creeps up toward the window, soil rolling into
his loafers, hoping he guessed their destination right, until he finds the pane
he’s looking for. He leans in, tries to get his ear as close to it as he can. Over
the sound of the wind rustling the bushes around him, he can hear two low,
tense voices.

“ . . . hell, Oscar,” says one voice, in Spanish. Luna. “Did you tell her?
Does she know you’re asking me to do this?”

“She’s too careful,” his father’s voice says. He’s speaking Spanish too—
a precaution the two of them occasionally take when they’re concerned
about being overheard. “Sometimes it’s best that she doesn’t know.”

There’s the sound of a hissing exhale, weight shifting. “I’m not going
behind her back to do something I don’t even want to do.”

“You mean to tell me, after what Richards did to you, there’s not a part
of you that wants to burn all his shit to the ground?”

“Of course there is, Oscar, Jesus,” Luna says. “But you and I both know
it’s not that fucking simple. It never is.”

“Listen, Raf. I know you kept the files on everything. You don’t even
have to make a statement. You could leak it to the press. How many other
kids do you think since—”

“Don’t.”
“—and how many more—”
“You don’t think she can win on her own, do you?” Luna cuts across
him. “You still don’t have faith in her, after everything.”
“It’s not about that. This time is different.”
“Why don’t you leave me and something that happened twenty fucking
years ago out of your unresolved feelings for your ex-wife and focus on
winning this goddamn election, Oscar? I don’t—”
Luna cuts himself off because there’s the sound of the doorknob turning,
someone entering the offices.

Oscar switches to clipped English, making an excuse about discussing a
bill, then says to Luna, in Spanish, “Just think about it.”

There are muffled sounds of Oscar and Luna clearing out of the office,
and Alex sinks down onto his ass in the mulch, wondering what the hell
he’s missing.
It starts with a fundraiser, a silk suit and a big check, a nice white-tablecloth
event. It starts, as it always does, with a text: Fundraiser in LA
next weekend for the HIV clinic. Pez says he’s
going to get us all matching embroidered kimonos.
Put you down for a plus-two?

He grabs lunch with his dad, who flat out changes the subject every
time Alex brings up Luna, and afterward, heads to the gala, where Alex gets
to properly meet Bea for the first time. She’s much shorter than Henry,
shorter even than June, with Henry’s clever mouth but their mom’s brown
hair and heart-shaped face. She’s wearing a motorcycle jacket over her
cocktail dress and has a slight posture he recognizes from his own mother
as a reformed chainsmoker. She smiles at Alex, wide and mischievous, and
he gets her immediately: another rebel kid.

It’s a lot of champagne and too many handshakes and a speech by Pez,
charming as always, and as soon as it’s over, their collective security
convenes at the exit and they’re off.

Pez has, as promised, six matching silk kimonos waiting in the limo,
each one embroidered across the back with a different riff on a name from a
movie. Alex’s is a lurid teal and says HOE DAMERON. Henry’s lime-green

one reads PRINCE BUTTERCUP.

They end up somewhere in West Hollywood at a shitty, sparkling
karaoke bar Pez somehow knows about, neons bright enough that it feels
spontaneous even though Cash and the rest of their security has been
checking it and warning people against taking photos for half an hour
before they arrived. The bartender has immaculate pink lipstick and stubble
poking through thick foundation, and they rapidly line up five shots and a
soda with lime.

“Oh, dear,” Henry says, peering down into his empty shot glass.
“What’s in these? Vodka?”

“Yep,” Nora confirms, to which both Pez and Bea break out into fits of
giggles.

“What?” Alex says.
“Oh, I haven’t had vodka since uni,” Henry says. “It tends to make me,
erm. Well—”
“Flamboyant?” Pez offers. “Uninhibited? Randy?”
“Fun?” Bea suggests.
“Excuse you, I am loads of fun all the time! I am a delight!”
“Hello, excuse me, can we get another round of these please?” Alex
calls down the bar.
Bea screams, Henry laughs and throws up a V, and it all goes hazy and
warm in the way Alex loves. They all tumble into a round booth, and the
lights are low, and he and Henry are keeping a safe distance, but Alex can’t
stop staring at how the special-effect beams keep hitting Henry’s
cheekbones, hollowing his face out in blues and greens. He’s something
else—half-drunk and grinning in a $2,000 suit and a kimono, and Alex
can’t tear his eyes away. He waves over a beer.
Once things get going, it’s impossible to tell how Bea is the one
persuaded up to the stage first, but she unearths a plastic crown from the
prop chest onstage and rips through a cover of “Call Me” by Blondie. They
all wolf whistle and cheer, and the bar crowd finally realizes they’ve got
two members of the royal family, a millionaire philanthropist, and the
White House Trio crammed into one of the sticky booths in a rainbow of
vivid silk. Three rounds of shots appear—one from a drunk bachelorette
party, one from a herd of surly butch chicks at the bar, and one from a table
of drag queens. They raise a toast, and Alex feels more welcomed than he
ever has before, even at his family’s victory rallies.
Pez gets up and launches into “So Emotional” by Whitney Houston in a
shockingly flawless falsetto that has the whole club on their feet in a matter
of moments, shouting their approval as he belts out the glory notes. Alex
looks over in giddy awe at Henry, who laughs and shrugs.
“I told you, there’s nothing he can’t do,” he shouts over the noise.
June is watching the whole performance with her hands clapped to her
face, her mouth hanging open, and she leans over to Nora and drunkenly
yells, “Oh, no . . . he’s . . . so . . . hot . . .”
“I know, babe,” Nora yells back.

“I want to . . . put my fingers in his mouth . . .” she moans, sounding
horrified.

Nora cackles and nods appreciatively and says, “Can I help?”
Bea, who has gone through five different lime and sodas so far, politely
passes over a shot that’s been handed to her as Pez pulls June up on stage,
and Alex throws it back. The burn makes his smile and his legs spread a
little wider, and his phone is in his hand before he registers sliding it out of
his pocket. He texts Henry under the table: wanna do something
stupid?
He watches Henry pull his own phone out, grin, and arch a brow over at
him.
What could be stupider than this?
Henry’s mouth falls open into a very unflattering expression of drunken,
bewildered arousal, like a hot halibut, at his reply several beats later. Alex
smiles and leans back into the booth, making a show of wrapping wet lips
around the bottle of his beer. Henry looks like his entire life might be
flashing before his eyes, and he says, an octave too high, “Right, well, I’ll
just—nip to the loo!”
And he’s off while the rest of the group is still caught up Pez and June’s
performance. Alex gives it to the count of ten before slipping past Nora and
following. He swaps a glance with Cash, who’s standing against one wall,
gamely wearing a bright pink feather boa. He rolls his eyes but peels off to
watch the door.
Alex finds Henry leaning against the sink, arms folded.
“Have I mentioned lately that you’re a demon?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says, double-checking the coast is clear before
grabbing Henry by the belt and backing into a stall. “Tell me again later.”
“You—you know this is still not convincing me to sing, don’t you?”
Henry chokes out as Alex mouths along his throat.
“You really think it’s a good idea to present me with a challenge,
sweetheart?”
Which is how, thirty minutes and two more rounds later, Henry is in
front of a screaming crowd, absolutely butchering “Don’t Stop Me Now” by
Queen while Nora sings backup and Bea throws glittery gold roses at his
feet. His kimono is dangling off one shoulder so the embroidery across the

back reads PRINCE BUTT. Alex does not know where the roses came from,

and he can’t imagine asking would get him anywhere. He also wouldn’t be
able to hear the answer because he’s been screaming at the top of his lungs
for two minutes straight.

“I wanna make a supersonic woman of youuu!” Henry shouts, lunging
violently sideways, catching Nora by both arms. “Don’t stop me! Don’t stop
me! Don’t stop me!”

“Hey, hey, hey!” the entire bar yells back. Pez is practically on top of
the table now, pounding the back of the booth with one hand and helping
June up onto a chair with the other.

“Don’t stop me! Don’t stop me!”
Alex cups his hands around his mouth. “Ooh, ooh, ooh!”
In a cacophony of shouting and kicking and pelvic-thrusting and
flashing lights, the song blasts into the guitar solo, and there’s not a single
person in the bar in their seat, not when the Prince of England is knee-
sliding across the stage, playing passionate and somewhat erotic air guitar.
Nora has produced a bottle of champagne and starts spraying Henry
with it, and Alex loses his mind laughing, climbs on top of his seat and wolf
whistles. Bea is absolutely beside herself, tears streaming down her face,
and Pez is actually on top of the table now, June dancing beside him, and a
bright fuschia smear of lipstick in his platinum hair.
Alex feels a tug on his arm—Bea, dragging him down to the stage. She
grabs his hand and spins him in a ballerina twirl, and he puts one of her
roses between his teeth, and they watch Henry and grin at each other
through the noise. Alex feels somewhere, under the fifty layers of booze,
something crystal clear radiating off her, a shared knowledge of how rare
and wonderful this version of Henry is.
Henry is yelling into the microphone again, stumbling to his feet, his
suit and kimono stuck to him with champagne and sweat in a confusingly
sexy mess. His eyes flick upward, hazy and hot, and unmistakably lock with
Alex’s at the edge of the stage, smiling broad and messy. “I wanna make a
supersonic man outta youuuuu!”
By the end, there’s a standing ovation awaiting him, and Bea, with a
steady hand and a devilish smile, ruffling his champagne-sticky hair. She
steers him into the booth and Alex’s side, and he pulls her in after him, and